Many types of equipment require ongoing inspection and maintenance to ensure that the equipment is in proper and safe working order. This is true for stationary industrial equipment, and also for aircraft and other mobile equipment transportation equipment. Regular inspection and maintenance may be required not only for practical and economic reasons, but may also be mandatory for regulatory compliance. For example, in order to maintain airworthiness status, specific components and assemblies of both private and commercial aircraft must undergo inspection, plus maintenance or overhaul as required, at regulated intervals. These intervals are typically established in terms of service hours on the component in question, or service hours on the aircraft.
A commercial airliner may have dozens of components requiring regular inspection and maintenance, and this work must be performed with painstaking care by highly qualified technicians. At each inspection point, a technician must gain direct visual and physical access to component being inspected. Gaining such access may be a complicated exercise in itself. For example, inspection hatches for rudder and elevator components on a modern jetliner may be located high above the ground, so a technician may require scaffolding or mechanized equipment (e.g., a “cherry picker”) in order to gain access to such components.
Having gained access to a particular component, the technician must know exactly what steps need to be taken to inspect the component properly, and must know what maintenance or repair activities are required in the circumstances, according to the condition of the component as determined during the inspection, and the time interval since the previous inspection or maintenance procedure. Accordingly, the technician may need to have on-the-spot access to relevant provisions of the aircraft's maintenance manuals, including technical specifications and inspection checklists, as well as any work orders which may have been prepared for the specific inspection As well, it may often be necessary or desirable to have access to records of previous inspections, service, and maintenance.
The technician might conceivably have this information in his or her memory, but it is not desirable to rely on memory in connection with work in respect of which an error might jeopardize passenger safety. Therefore, the technician may need to carry several reference documents during the inspection. If the technician has forgotten any particulars of the inspection or maintenance to be performed, or has forgotten to bring required reference documents to the point of inspection, he or she may need to leave the inspection point to obtain or retrieve the necessary information, and then return to the inspection point to complete the required inspection or maintenance service.
Once the inspection has been made, and any necessary maintenance has been completed, the technician usually will need to record certain particulars of the work; e.g., date and time of inspection, identity of the technician, and details of maintenance or repairs performed. In addition, it will typically be necessary or desirable to transfer such information to a central record-keeping facility so that the maintenance history and the current serviceability status of the aircraft can be conveniently reviewed. For many aircraft operators, such as commercial airlines and military air forces, it may be particularly efficient and desirable to have this inspection and maintenance information stored in a computer database remote from the aircraft in question, and to have the information transferred to the database as soon as possible after the inspection or maintenance work has been completed, in order to have access to up-to-the-minute information on the condition of the aircraft and its availability for service.
This desirable objective may be difficult to achieve satisfactorily where the subject information must be transferred to the central record-keeping facility from a technician's handwritten notes, because there may sometimes be a delay between the time of the inspection or maintenance and the time of entry in the central records, even when the technician acts with reasonable diligence. In other cases, the technician may inadvertently neglect or forget to enter the information until a considerable time after the inspection or maintenance was performed, and in the worst case the information may never get entered at all. In addition, there is the risk that the information in the technician's notes will be transferred inaccurately or incompletely, not to mention the further risk than the information might be lost completely if the technician's notes are accidentally misplaced or destroyed before the information transfer can be carried out.
Because of factors such as those outlined above, security and storage of information related to inspection and maintenance of aircraft and other types or equipment, as well as timely access to information required for such inspection and maintenance, can be inconvenient and inefficient, and correspondingly time-consuming and expensive. One example of prior attempts to address these problems is U.S. Pat. No. 5,931,877, issued on Aug. 3, 1999 to Smith (et al.), which discloses a system providing electronic access to a central data warehouse which stores information from technical mutuals relating to the various pieces of equipment being supported by the system, as well as historical maintenance information for specific pieces of equipment. Maintenance technicians may acquire access to the information in the central data warehouse by use of a hand-held computer, or portable maintenance aid (“PMA”), via wireless transceivers or high-speed land lines. The technicians therefore do not need access to hard copies of the technical and historical maintenance information for the equipment they are working on, and they can transmit data regarding their maintenance tasks back to the central data warehouse through use of the PMA.
The PMA forms part of a fundamental element of the Smith system, namely, a test means for identifying failed equipment components. More specifically, the test means provides for automated downloading, to the PMA, of built-in test (or “BIT”) data available from a bus in particular equipment units such as sophisticated military aircraft and weaponry components Accordingly, the Smith system's practical usefulness is therefore best found in association with such specialized equipment adapted for BIT logic analysis, and it is not readily and economically adaptable for use with other types of equipment. Perhaps the most significant drawback of the Smith system, however, is the fact that technicians' work will be seriously hampered or delayed in the event of breakdown of communications with the central data warehouse, which will typically be the technicians' only convenient source of reliable technical and historical information which may be needed to complete a particular maintenance task.
For the foregoing reasons, there is a need for a method and apparatus for recording and storing inspection and maintenance information in a central data storage facility promptly upon completion of the inspection or maintenance work, without requiring transfer of the information from handwritten notes. In addition, there is a need for a method and apparatus for providing paperless access to inspection and maintenance reference information, such as information in technical service manuals, or historical inspection and maintenance information, directly at the point of inspection or maintenance. Furthermore, there is a need for a method and apparatus for storage of technical and historical inspection and maintenance information directly on the equipment in question, preferably in the immediate vicinity of the point of inspection or maintenance. The present invention is directed to these needs.